Formerly a Teaching Associate at the University of Cambridge and a British Academy Fellow at the University of Warwick, he is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin.
Grundy applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Never By Itself Alone: Queer Poetry, Queer Communities in Boston and the Bay Area, 1944―Present, and reported the following:
Page 99 is the third page of the book’s third chapter, on the so-called “Occult School” of Boston poets. The page is a profile of the poet Ed Marshall, described there as “poet, street preacher and denizen of the queer underworld”. It introduces Marshall and provides a brief introductory biography. This page of the book is a good example of the archival approach I draw on throughout. It focuses on an object from the archives of the publisher Irving Rosenthal: a small mirror that Marshall affixed to his shoe to assess the sexual prospects within adjacent cubicles while cruising men’s rooms. I suggest that the archival mirror (literally) reveals to the scholar their own face as (metaphorically) the object of Marshall’s own enquiry, cruised out of time. I also draw on the figure of the ‘glory hole’ in Marshall’s work to suggest the contradictions it turns into something furtive and pleasurable: cruising and the necessity to move on versus the impulse to stay, watch, and enjoy anonymised sensual delight, a sociality under pressure, taking place underground and in the cracks of society and of literary history.Learn more about Never By Itself Alone at the Oxford University Press website.
For the poets in this book, such questions—sex life, the inhabitation of public space—could not be separated from their poetry, whether it was their poems’ explicit subject or not. But the record is fragmentary. Amassing details around the dozens of poets covered in this story, many of whom have received scant, if any, prior attention, involves telling stories, uncovering archives, working the way through trails of anecdote and evidence, sometimes within poems, sometimes outside them.
The term “Occult School” comes from poet Gerrit Lansing, describing a group of poets—one of many such in the book—who formed provisional, small and temporary communities united by poetry and queer sexuality. Lansing, a student of Aleister Crowley and other esoteric thinkers, uses the term to pun on way such poets are left out—occluded—from conventional literary histories. With no one there to preserve one’s stories, how do they survive? In the shadows, obscurely, in the poetic, political underground. With the explosion of political movements in the ’60s—Civil Rights, Black Power, Women’s and Gay Liberation—the underground came out and above ground. Yet the devastating impact of AIDS created a loss of generational memory, effectively wiping out of prior generations of activists and artists. Today, as a new New Right resurges throughout the USA and worldwide, it’s helpful to remember the way generations of queer poets and activists resisted the forces that would slur, jail, queerbash and electroshock them into silence. Ed Marshall is just one of those voices.
--Marshal Zeringue
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